Apple TV's comedy-horror hit 'Widow's Bay' just made Emmy history, scooping 14 awards — a first for the genre — and fans are now tracking down the real places behind its cursed island town. Good news: you can visit nearly all of them, scattered across the Massachusetts coast and countryside.
The show itself is deliberately ambiguous. Creator Katie Dippold wanted her fictional island to feel like a Stephen King novel — an eerie place reached by a ferry that might come from Massachusetts or Maine, but never quite specified. Matthew Rhys, who plays a mayor scheming to turn his cursed hometown into the next Martha's Vineyard, told The Boston Globe that filming on location did half the atmospheric work for free. The series premiered in April, has a cult following, and a second season is in development.
The biggest chunk of filming happened in Rockport. Old Harbour Road doubled as the town centre, and the on-screen restaurant The Salty Whale sits at 14 Old Harbour Road, on the site of a former shop called Dark Star Philosophia. The retro-looking Ice Cream Store from the show is genuinely real — find it at 14 Bearskin Neck — and the bench where Patricia, the mayor's quirky assistant, reads her unsettling book is at White Wharf.
Town hall scenes were shot further inland at Berlin Town Hall, an 1870 building in a small agricultural town of roughly 3,000 people (locals pronounce it BUR-lin, and its claim to fame is asparagus). Film buffs may recognise it from 2023's 'The Holdovers'. Back on the coast, Gloucester supplied several key locations: Lanes Cove played the Harbour Master's Office where ferries depart, Half Moon Beach hosted the mayor's 'inaugural swim', and the Eastern Point Lighthouse at Cape Ann stood in for the show's lighthouse, including a pivotal scene with the lighthouse keeper.
Two quieter spots round out the list. The Lorenzo Maynard House in Maynard, a 19th-century mansard-roofed building once home to a wealthy mill-era industrialist, provided the haunted inn's exteriors — though it's now an ordinary apartment block, so no poltergeists reported. And the Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, where a rather grim plot point unfolds, has a great backstory of its own: Henry Ford built it in 1940, naming it after his mother and mother-in-law, using timber felled in a hurricane two years earlier. On the grounds sits an old schoolhouse Ford believed inspired the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had A Little Lamb'.
For travellers, this is a tidy self-guided itinerary: base yourself around Gloucester or Rockport on Cape Ann, an easy day trip or weekend from Boston, and string together harbour walks, lighthouse views and small-town New England charm. Fans get the filming locations; everyone else gets one of the prettiest stretches of the Massachusetts coast.